Chapter 342 - 333 — Snatchers in the Pass I

Chapter 342: Chapter 333 — Snatchers in the Pass I

It came down the eastern wall in three strides and then it was not on the wall anymore.

Wings opened — broad, dark, ragged along the trailing edges — and the noise of them arriving in a fifteen-metre stone corridor was enormous, a hard double clap that came back off both cliffs and doubled itself so that it seemed to be happening on all sides at once.

The body was a bird’s. Deep-chested, filthy, feathered in dark grey-brown, with legs that ended in feet made for taking hold of things — four talons, long, curved, the back one as long as a finger.

The face on the front of it was a woman’s.

Gaunt. Hollow under the cheekbones, hollow at the temples, with the skin drawn so tight over the skull that the shape of the teeth showed through the lips. Black hair came off the head in a matted mass and went back along the line of the shoulders into the feathers, so that there was no clean place where the woman stopped and the bird began.

It was starving. Everything about it was starving.

`[HARPY]`

`[LEVEL: 48]`

`[HP: 4,200 / 4,200]`

James was standing in the open with a sword in his hand, eleven metres from the wagon.

It went past him as if he did not exist.

---

"*RONAN—*"

He was already there.

The Harpy came in low over the front of the wagon with its feet forward and its wings cupped to kill speed, and every part of that movement was aimed at the driver’s board and the man sitting on it.

Ronan got the shield up over Halden’s head and shoulders and simply stood there.

The talons hit the face of the shield with a clatter like somebody throwing a handful of nails, and the whole creature pivoted off it and away — and did not land, and did not turn to fight.

It went straight back up.

Three wingbeats and it was eight metres above the road, and four more and it was on a ledge on the western wall, thirty metres up, with its wings folding, watching them.

`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING STRIKE]`

The bolt went where it had been about a third of a second earlier.

"*Oh, that’s not fair,*" said Cillian.

---

"Don’t chase it," James said.

"I wasn’t going to—"

"Finn. *Don’t chase it.*"

Finn, who had taken four steps toward the western wall, stopped and came back. "I know. There’s nothing to chase."

The horses were the immediate problem. Both of them had gone rigid in the harness with their heads up and their ears flat, and the bay was trying to back into the traces, and Maeve was at the headpieces with one hand on each.

"*Halden, keep her going—*"

"Trying—"

"Don’t stop in the narrow bit," James said. "Whatever happens, don’t stop." 𝘧𝓇ℯℴ𝓂

The wagon began moving again, and the repaired wheel took up its uneven *thud-thud* against the stone, and it came back off the cliffs twice.

---

They learned the pattern over the next ninety seconds because the Harpies taught it to them.

Two came off the eastern wall together, from different heights, and one broke off before it reached the wagon while the other went for the canvas and caught nothing and was gone in under two seconds.

One came from behind, low along the road, so fast that Cillian had it in his sightline for less than a second.

One came at the horses and Finn put an axe into the air where its head was going to be and missed by a hand’s width, and it went up the western cliff and was on a ledge before he had recovered the swing.

They did not fight. Not one of them stayed on the ground for longer than it took to reach for something.

Dive, grab, gone. From alternating walls, at alternating heights, at a speed that made Finn Hale look slow.

"They’re not trying to kill us," said Maeve, from the horses’ heads. "They’re *shopping*."

"They want him out of the wagon," said James.

"They want him out of the wagon," Halden agreed, from the board. "That’s what they do. That’s what everything out here does."

---

James did the only sensible thing and stopped looking up.

He had nothing.

That was the position, and he had known it since the station and had been hoping the road would fix it. Three skeletons had died holding a gateway and he had walked away from twenty-six usable bodies because there had been forty seconds and a jack to pull, and he had come into the pass with an empty board for the first time in about nine floors.

There was nothing to raise in here. That was the whole horror of the place. Wagons, packs, gear, and no people.

Except there were four dead draft horses in the middle of the road behind them, dried rather than rotted, still in broken harness.

James went to the nearest one and put his palm flat on its ribs.

`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA]`

`[MANA: 2,020 / 3,100]`

It came up on four legs.

It was, by a distance, the worst thing he had ever raised. Enormous, slow, wrong at every joint, with a head the size of his own chest and no offensive value whatsoever — it could not swing at anything and it could not catch anything and it was never going to be quick enough to matter.

It could stand next to a wagon. It could take a talon meant for a canvas roof.

And it was a body, in a place with no bodies, which meant it was somewhere to Grave Step to.

He walked it in behind the tailboard and left it there.

"That’s grim," said Cillian.

"It’s a wall."

"It’s a *horse*, James."

---

They found the Harpies’ one real weakness about two minutes in, and it belonged entirely to Cillian.

He stopped shooting at them.

He stopped tracking the ones circling forty metres up, which had been a waste of everything, and started holding — hand up, light on his knuckles, doing nothing while three of them wheeled overhead.

And when one committed to a dive, and was locked into a line it could not leave, he took it.

`[CILLIAN WARD — LIGHTNING STRIKE]`

It came apart in the air eleven metres above the road and the body came down in front of the lead horse and skidded.

"*THAT’S* the timing," he shouted, with more joy than the situation deserved. "You have to let them start!"

Finn got to it before it stopped moving and finished it, and James was on the corpse four seconds later with his hand on its sternum.

`[HARPY SLAIN]`

`[CALL OF SOULS ACTIVATED — MANA RESTORED: +30]`

`[MANA: 2,050 / 3,100]`

`[SUMMON UNDEAD SKELETON — 80 MANA]`

`[MANA: 1,970 / 3,100]`

That one came up on two legs with a wing frame on each side and was worth about four of the horse.

He put it on the roof of the wagon.

---

After that it went well enough that the next stretch compresses into almost nothing.

Cillian took three more on committed dives. Ronan turned two off the shield without moving his feet. Finn caught one on the ground when it misjudged its own speed and came in too low behind the tailboard.

Fossor stayed out ahead, a hundred metres up the road, and found nothing at all, and that was exactly what James wanted it doing. It was no use whatsoever against something forty metres in the air and there was no point pretending otherwise — but it was the only thing in the party that could promise him the next bend was empty.

`[TIME REMAINING: 0:06:50]`

`[DISTANCE REMAINING: 0.95 KM]`

And the number of them went up.

There had been four when it started. By the time they had put five down there were eleven above the road, on both walls, at four different heights, and more coming along the ledges from the eastern end of the pass.

They had followed the wagon in. All of them.

---

Then the Harpies stopped taking turns.

Four came off the western wall at once, from four different heights, in a spread that covered the whole front half of the wagon — and Cillian had to pick one, and Finn had to cover the horses, and Ronan had to be on the board.

The fifth came from behind and above, silent, over the tailboard.

It landed on the canvas.

The whole roof went down under it with a crack of hoop timber and the talons went straight through the covering as though it were paper — four long tears opening at once, and the creature hauled backwards and ripped a hole in the top of the wagon a metre and a half across.

Halden was directly underneath it.

"*ROOF—*"

He tried to move. James watched him try, from eleven metres away with a Harpy coming at his own head. The man got one arm up and one shoulder off the boards and then his own abdomen stopped him dead, and he made a noise, and did not get any further.

The Harpy reached through the hole and got a fistful of the front of his shirt and the strap of the dispatch satchel.

And it pulled.